Alphabet Song

I spend a lot of time thinking about story.  I read stories.  I write stories.  I internalize other peoples' stories and carry them around with me like so many backpacks, purses, drawstring bags, tiny leather suitcases, sports duffle bags, brown paper sacks, or mason jars, all filled to the brim.

Lately I've been a mobile story maven.  This is what the van of a mobile story maven looks like as she travels the southeast shopping, hauling, decorating, and organizing for three young women who are embarking on yet another chapter of education and experience.

It's a motley junk pile of cast-offs from home, new stuff from Lowe's, Walmart, K-mart and even Roses--stuff to return, stuff to pack, stuff to unpack, stuff to make part of a new home in a new place.

I've touched every bit of this stuff, sometimes more than once.  I keep a running mental inventory of stuff we have, stuff they have, stuff I've seen in the above mentioned retail outlets, and I have a constantly looping visual screening of their chosen domiciles.  I'm either a 24-hour a day bargain hunting decorating ninja or a mildly (and that's subjective) insane middle-aged woman.  Take your pick.

But at the bottom of all the shopping, hauling, loading, unloading, setting up and taking down, in between all the folding and nailing, trying out and fitting in, there's a lot of story.  

There are young people in love (no, not them--us, a long time ago).  There are lots of dreams and late-night confabs.  There's laughter and tears and mind-numbing boredom.  There's laundry and junk food and green beans and pop tarts.  There's everybody squeezed in one room more nights than I can remember, and there's three young women in their own, unique-to-them spaces.

There's a mom with her hand cupped over chubby fingers, watching the fat pencil make loopy letters.  She sees the words take shape, she reads the story as it unfolds on the page, and then, ever-so-slowly, she lets go.

Long Day's Journey

Sunday afternoon I landed at the forks of Troublesome Creek in Hindman--an easy four-hour drive, but miles of slender grass and thousands of tender leaves away from my daily crawling ground.  

I enter the mountain atmosphere carefully, creeping over the bridge and into Mike Mullins’ office for my nametag.  Maybe if I scrunch down and hunker my way across, nobody will notice the Kroger mom in her daughter’s Aeropostale flip-flops.

Give it a few hours.  The misty air, the clink of silver, the clanging dinner bell, work their magic.  The voices of women talking story, telling family, sharing life, lure me in.  Pretty soon I find a chair on the edge of the circle, listening in, hanging on, to the words that fill my ears and stuff my mind.  With the first assignment of the week my fingers and my brain begin the long stretch toward my own words on my own page.

Come Friday I will inch my way over that bridge and back into my life.  I am heavy with words.  I am light as a feather.